Side Effects

I am so happy to say I was not disappointed in "Side Effects" at all. You never know with these small-budget thrillers. Sometimes they slip by and no one sees them, and there's no way to know if it's because they were awful or because they just didn't have a promotional budget.

Rooney Mara, looking nothing like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, (I wouldn't have recognized her, had it not been for her unusual name) plays a depressed woman whose doctor prescribes experimental drugs. She has tried several traditional anti-depressants, and none of them work anymore. However, once she is on the new drugs, she commits a bloody crime while sleepwalking, and has no memory of the event in the morning. It's up to the viewer to decide who's to blame.

Scene by scene we become more and more uneasy. Could her doctor have prevented this? What made her become so violent? Was there something in her history that we don't know about? What was in those drugs, anyway? Is there any precedent for sleepwalkers to be acquitted of their crimes? (It turns out, there is.)

Her doctor, played by Jude Law, seems like a very nice guy at first (sympathetic to a non-English speaker who finds himself in a psychiatrist's office because of language barriers). After a while though, we learn that he's on the take of Big Pharma. This theme is so pervasive these days, we feel right at home with it. Of course, we say: this is what doctors do. The guy is pushing new experimental drugs right and left. It seems risky and uncertain -- but does it mean he's a bad guy? Hard to be sure. But he's going to suffer from the publicity of this patient's case, either way. He'll lose his reputation and be attacked by his business partners and his wife before this is over.

Meanwhile Rooney Mara does amazing things with her eyes -- they can be zombie-like, empty of all humanity; or droop downward like a heroin addict's; or shine with manic tears and anger. It's very hard to tell what's in her head, indeed.

I can't really say more than this. If you like psychological thrillers, which are frightening not because of their shock value, but because of their familiarity -- the eerie similarity to the anxious uncertainty of real life -- you will love this movie, too.